Oftentimes individuals in an organization require contact and personnel information from peers across the organization. Such information may pertain to employee contact information, employee location or department, employee manager information, and so on. Such information may be found in a corporate directory, e.g., which may include contact information and corporate organization structure. Typically, a corporate directory may be accessed from a browser, rich client, PDA client, cellular phone, and similar devices/application.
Situations may arise in which an individual is disconnected from the network (e.g. working off-line, on the road, in a meeting room with no network connectivity, on a train), but may require information on a peer, for example to make contact with a peer. In conventional systems, in which a corporate directory is accessible via a network such as the internet, the individual may be unable to look up the peers contact information. To overcome this problem, the individual may have the ability to replicate the entire corporate directory locally for accessing off-line.
In large organizations, replicating an entire directory locally may not be feasible or desirable. For example, when using memory constrained devices (such as PDA's or cellular phones), the device may not have the memory resources to store a multi-thousand employee corporate directory. Issues associated with the size of the directory are sometimes resolved by eliminating some of the content to reduce the off-line footprint. For example, the off-line directory may only include user name and contact number, removing photo/images, organizational position, and such. However, removing some of this content may challenge or dilute specifics of a query that an off-line user may have.
Even if the off-line footprint is not limited, an individual may not need or desire the entire corporate directory. For example, the individual may only regularly interact with a relatively small number of peers. It may be considered cumbersome and undesirable to have to search through an entire corporate directory for the desired information every time contact information is needed.